Far Away

Far Away is more a series of episodes than a strict story: although the scenes are thematically linked, they refuse to build into a lineal narrative. Perhaps the characters in the last scene are the same as those in the last (the convention of using cast members in different roles confuse this). Perhaps the societies that each scene represents are the same one in different stages – the play starts in a recognisable presence, with a spot of human trafficking in the shed, and goes through a totalitarian phase before concluding in total warfare. The fuzziness around the edges of events – the deadly parade’s victims are not defined, the alliances between man and beast are wild Aesops – lend Far Away an allusive, allegorical power.

Although the structure shares much with Possibilities, Barker’s series of short sketches that the RCS staged to such success at the Tron, Churchill’s play is closer to the science fiction short. Apart from the first scene, the action happens in societies that are not contemporary: scene two revolves around hat makers readying their produce for a bizarre parade that ends in death, and the finale is a list of various inter-species alliances (the deer have changed sides, nationalities line up with animal groups, and the alligators are murderous).

The bleakness and surrealism are familiar from Beckett: meaning is suspended, the universe is hostile, but Churchill has a more political bias. From the off-stage violence against the humans being trafficked to the shifting alliances of man and beast, her dystopian vision permeates each scene. The source of power and oppression is never located, or exposed, but it broods in the background behind the repressed conversations and paranoid observations.

Churchill adapts the hyper-reality of the stage to make general points about the corruption of societies, never settling on a simple point but stretching her concepts into the abstract. I struggled to express the experience…